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Chicago Sky forward Angel Reese Credit: X<\/p>\nChicago Sky forward Angel Reese Credit: X<\/p>\n
The WNBA ended its decades-long search after the 2024 Draft last year when at last they found their heterosexual great white hope (Caitlin Clark) with whom they could draw new fans. It also begot a convenient Black villain (Angel Reese) who helped conjure up a faux rivalry to keep fans coming \u2014 and hating.<\/p>\n
This unleashed a divisive atmosphere on social media and at times at games, casting a good v. evil narrative. The vitriol, most of it under the guise of rooting for Clark, in essence turned nasty and racist whenever Reese and her fellow Black females were involved.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
You either like Clark and hate Reese, or you like Reese and the other Black W\u2019ers and hate the white player. It became the 21st century Pandora\u2019s Box in America\u2019s majority-Black women pro league.<\/p>\n
This seemed encouraged and slow to address by league officials, especially Commissioner Cathy Engelbert. She was asked last fall on a cable news show, \u201cHow do you try and stay ahead\u2026or act as a league when two of your most visible players are involved \u2014 not personally but their fanbases are involved \u2014 in saying some very uncharitable things about the other?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Engelbert responded, \u201cThe one thing I know about sports, you need rivalry. That\u2019s what makes people watch. They don\u2019t want everybody being nice to one another.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
She was roundly criticized afterwards by both Black and white players for not speaking out more strongly against the racism and hate speech directed at players, and she stumbled in her apology trying to clean up her misstatements.<\/p>\n
That might have been the linchpin for the players\u2019 distrust of her, which came to a raging boil two weeks ago in the \u201cNapheesa Collier v. the Commish she said, she said\u201d kerfuffle that was the focus of last week\u2019s Another View.<\/p>\n
\u201cSport is a stage of real life. It is an additive of an existing system.\u201d<\/p>\n
Journalist Amber D. Dodd spoke to us after we\u2019d read her no-holds-barred treatise on how Black females are treated in society on her \u201cExtremely Unimpressed\u201d column on Substack. Her focus was the historical hatred of Black women treatment \u2014 misogynoir, a term that Black feminist scholar Moya Bailey first introduced in 2008.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the first two seasons of Angel\u2019s WNBA career, she has been a passenger on a train anyone would want to get off of: constant bullying, surveillance, the intentional misconstruing of her words and motives,\u201d wrote Dodd on Reese.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The veteran journalist added, \u201cI think that we\u2019ve seen it for generations,\u201d as she explained that in Clark\u2019s case, Dodd calls it \u201cdigital misogynoir.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I would like to leave people with is that the fact that sport is a stage of real life,\u201d Dodd continued. \u201cIt is an additive of an existing system.<\/p>\n
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Amber D. Dodd<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a young Black woman, I understand my role in society is to be the brunt bearer. And that really does double down when you add racism to it as well, to that sexism, which makes us a very, very toxic blend of misogynoir. You see it ingrained and embedded into our systems of society.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, it does not surprise me that even today,\u201d surmised Dodd, \u201cwhether you\u2019re a basketball player, whether you\u2019re a journalist as I am, whether you\u2019re a nurse or a doctor, you will see Black women in these roles take on a lot more that is very reminiscent of how our roles are in society.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, I wanted the essay to really showcase that importance of understanding Black women,\u201d she concluded, \u201cthe treatment of Black women on a larger scale, and then zeroing in through a lens of sports.\u201d<\/p>\n